Time to ease Minnesota's COVID rules

It's Friday, Friday! Here are top headlines for your weekend:

This weekend starts off mild, and will end on a wet, wintry note. Highs today will be around 40s for most of Minnesota, with sunny skies. Saturday will be a bit breezy with highs in the 50s in many areas; Sunday will be a little cooler, and there's a chance of snow late Sunday night. Get the latest on Updraft.

At 11 a.m. today, Gov. Tim Walz will announce a major pullback on Minnesota’s remaining COVID restrictions.

Walz, who gave reporters a heads up Thursday, didn’t offer many details but said it would be his biggest move yet in easing restrictions, with guidance on proms, sports and other larger gatherings.

MPR News will carry his announcement live. Watch or listen on MPRNews.org or via our Facebook page.

That dial-back comes as Minnesota confirms its first South Africa COVID variant case.

That means the state now has confirmed cases of all three known variants -- from Brazil, the U.K. and from South Africa. All those variants, scientists say, appear to be more contagious , but a lot is still unknown.

Here are Minnesota’s latest COVID-19 statistics:

The latest on Derek Chauvin's trial: Six jurors seated so far.

The sixth juror, the only one selected on Thursday, wrote in his questionnaire that "there was no reason for Chauvin to kneel on his neck for so long," but also told the court that none of it would have happened if George Floyd had complied with officers. The six jurors seated include three white men, a Hispanic man, a Black man who is an immigrant and a woman who identifies as multiracial.

The ex-cop now faces three charges, including a third-degree murder count, in the death of George Floyd.

Judge Peter Cahill previously said that the charge did not apply to cases where just a single person is endangered. But an appeals court decision ruled the judge erred and needed to reconsider adding the charge. But after additional back and forth between the courts, Cahill decided he was bound by the Court of Appeals ruling.

Jury selection is set to resume at 9 a.m. today. Follow our latest coverage on the trial and watch the proceedings live on MPRNews.org.

Upon signing the COVID-19 aid bill, President Joe Biden is pushing for shots for all adults by May 1.

President Joe Biden is aiming for the country to begin to find a degree of normalcy and begin to move on from the coronavirus pandemic by the July 4th holiday, Biden announced in his first prime-time address Thursday night from the White House on the one-year anniversary of the pandemic.

Let's take a look back at the past one year, what we've learned and what we've lost.

After an entire year, it's easy to forget how suddenly the pandemic upended our lives. But looking back through the photos on our phones can show us just how quickly everything changed. NPR asked people to send us their last "normal" photo of 2020 and their first pandemic photo. Thousands of you responded. Watch a compilation of your COVID-year stories here.

Weeks later, and after many hearings, still no clear answer on why security officials treated BLM protesters and pro-Trump rioters differently.

More than 15 hours of testimony failed to answer fundamental questions about the Capitol attack. Among them: What exactly led to the security failure and why national security officials responded differently to the Jan. 6 insurrection than BLM protests last summer. ProPublica's Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan take a deep dive into why we couldn't prevent the Capitol from being stormed on Jan. 6.

This Sunday at 6 p.m., Gov. Walz will deliver his third State of the State address.

He'll speak from his former social studies classroom at Mankato West High School. You can watch or listen to the governor's remarks live on MPR News Sunday evening.

🎧 Tune in to stay informed and connected. Here's what's coming up on MPR News today.

— Jiwon Choi, MPR News | Find me on Twitter @ChoiGEE1